Posted on 05/04/2018 6:42:25 AM PDT by Bull Snipe
Leading elements of Union Major General George G. Meade's Army of the Potomac cross the Rapidan River. With a few hours they would clash with General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in the Battle of the Wilderness. Lieutenant General Grant's Overland Campaign had begun.
The problem with your thinking here is the fact that Lincoln refused to recognize them as a "country" and would only argue they were states in rebellion against his rightful authority.
Now if they were indeed a separate country, then your claim makes sense, but if they were still part of the United States, the constitutional law still applied. Constitutional law was denied to them.
As I've said before. When they needed the South to be regarded as another "country", they would treat it as such, and when they needed the South to be regarded as "states", they would treat it that way.
The South was in a state of quantum superposition, being both "states", and a "Country" to fit whatever legal argument the North wanted to make on any given day.
It depends on how you look at it. One method required the rule of law and consent of the governed, and the other was imposed dictatorship.
Which of the two would you regard as the more moral?
Slaves were used to support the Confederate War effort.
As a matter of fact, without slaves to aid them, the Confederacy’s demise would have been a whole lot faster than it was. How many masters of runaway or missing slaves presented themselves to Union Army headquarters to claim their property as required by Art IV, section 2.
Can see slavery in the USA till way past the 20th century if the South had remained in the Union. Longer if Lincoln had passed the Corwin amendment.
So if slavery is the lynchpin of your justification, how do you deal with the issue in what would have been the probable future of continuing Union slavery?
They called themselves a Country, and engaged in a war with the United States. They denied the Constitution of the United States.
Yes. It was always about economic realities.
The more valid question is how many could stop such an amendment?
Because it takes 3/4ths of the states to amend the constitution, anything over 1/4th of the states could stop it.
It effectively took only 9 states to prevent an amendment to the Constitution, and 15 states gives you a margin of 6 states more than needed.
It was effectively impossible for the Union to abolish slavery, at least by any valid legal means. This is why they resorted to Dictator tactics to do it.
They did with the gun what they couldn't do with the law.
The very definition of dictatorship.
In this specific case your correct. Machines would have replaced slaves, just as machines have replaced assembly line workers.
Once they seceded it was no longer a United States military installation. It belonged to them.
This is what the entire argument hinges upon. If the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence (our own founding document) is true, then they had a right to secede, and therefore the fort was theirs. If it is not true, our own nation is not legitimate either.
I personally believe that the Laws of Nature, and of Nature's God, grant any people anywhere the right to be free of a government they despise, and which no longer represents their interests.
So did Abraham Lincoln, twice, prior to 1860.
With all the money routed back through New York, and under the control of both New York and Washington.
New York was getting rich off of the natural trade between Europe and the South that really had nothing to do with them.
The powers that ran New York and Washington DC (The same bloody people who are controlling us *NOW*) wanted to keep this gravy train going, and that is the ultimate cause of the war.
It did not belong to them. The Government of South Carolina ceded the land that Sumter was built on in perpetuity to the Government of the United States. The Government lived up to its obligation and built Fort Sumter.
Because when someone sends a fleet of 8 armed ships with orders to fire cannons at your people, rational people just sit there and let their men be killed.
Silly Davis. Didn't he understand that they would only kill so many people as necessary?
Lincoln started the War. Most of his cabinet told him his action of sending those warships would start the war. Major Anderson himself said that this action would start the war.
There is no sane person, knowing what we have since learned, that would think sending 8 warships with orders to attack people, would not start a war.
The Clever bit was how Lincoln grabbed the command ship at the last minute and sent it to Florida (in disguise) without letting anyone know that nothing was going to happen because the Command ship had been pulled from the armada.
three armed ships, one chartered commercial vessel carrying provision, troops and weapons, and two chartered steam tugs. Force authorized only if the Charleston authorities resisted the resupply effort. Enough of the high school dramatics.
That doesn't even make sense. These services are all at a loss. None of them make profit. Without profit, there is no business.
That would have continued after cotton harvesting had been mechanized.
Perhaps for awhile, but I believe that once you've taken the profit out of it, social stigma would have been more than a match for whatever interest they had in keeping servants.
The Slave states would have slowly fallen to the very same social forces that drove slavery out of the North.
Well that's just backwards. Davis defended his country from another larger country that would pay an unbelievable price if it insisted on imposing it's will on them.
No rational person would have believed that the North would send so many people to die in a war of conquest. A rational player in the North would not have been willing to let so many die in such a hard effort, and so the chances that the South would beat back the invaders was a reasonable position so long as you have a reasonable person in charge of the invaders.
King George III could have won too, but it would have cost much more in blood and treasure. Fortunately for us, Mad King George III was saner than Lincoln.
His hope was that the Europeans would intervene to save the situation for him.
And that was not an unreasonable surmise either. I just learned over this weekend that "Cinco de Mayo" is a celebration of a Defeat of a French army of 8,000 men by a poorly equipped Mexican army of 4,000 men. It is claimed that had the French maintained their beachhead, they would have thrown in with the South's efforts to become independent.
When he was 5? I don't think even Lincoln was that precocious.
News paper editorials are objective and have no reason to slant things to fit their agenda? In what universe?
Besides, this isn't constitutional. (It really isn't constitutional.)
It was indeed. The newspaper was criticizing Lincoln for not freeing slaves he didn't have the power to free under the Constitution.
None.
Because sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander.
If the gander is engaging in the same kind of rebellion that the goose is then I would agree.
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